Ho-ley shit, this show is a leftist nightmare. I mean, to be fair, it makes fun of EVERYBODY, but there's an absolute ton of things that absolutely would not fly in [Current Year]. Like, things that you can't even begin to joke about. Shit that if the writers even THOUGHT about adding such a thing to the script in 2023, they would be fired, canceled, and probably physically assaulted over. I know that the dub came out in 2005, well before the woke infestation truly took over, but I can't imagine that the terminally online liberals haven't dug through the dirty laundry of every single person involved with this show, from the directors to the writers to the voice actors to the janitor at the studio.
Actually lemme back up for a sec. For those of you who are unaware, Ghost Stories (Gakkou no Kaidan in Japan) was originally released in 2000, and was basically a horror show for kids ala Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark. The show bombed, and rumor has it that the JP studio sold the rights to ADV and told them to basically do whatever they wanted with it, as long as it could make back some of the money from producing this turd of a show. And so... ADV went with a gag dub that was as offensive to everybody as possible. Even though the translation is explicitly wrong and entirely made up, it's widely regarded as a "good dub" because it's hilarious and because nobody really cared about the original show to begin with.
Let me give you some examples of the dub's dialog. These screenshots have subs, but they're dubtitles so this is what they were actually saying in the dub.
They make fun of trannies a few times. 1, 2, 3
They regularly call the main character's little brother retarded. 1, 2, 3, 3
Lots of insulting gay people, and lots of the forbidden f-word. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Lots of racism. 1-1, 1-2, 2, 3, 4, 5
Making fun of the Jews. 1, 2, 3
Of course, they also make fun of the right too, but the right can actually take a joke, unlike the left.
Anyway, as you can see, this show's dub is probably like kryptonite to liberals. There's no way it doesn't make them seethe. So my question is... have the woketards actually gone after any of the people involved in the show? Hell, have the staff themselves all become woketards and apologized profusely for working on this show? I haven't actually looked any of them up, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case.
I've said this before, they just care about fitting in and attention. In the early 2000's the way to do that was be rude and crass with grossout humour. Now it's about progressive virtue signaling.
You can see the trend many times. If there's a hardcore leftist who was tweeting in the early days of twitter if they haven't deleted it you can see many rape or dead baby jokes like that.
The Ghost Stories dub is disgraceful also because it ruins a good show. It had reruns in Japanese many years later, which destroys their premise that it was just a show nobody cared about.
Just look at the guys you posted with on every forum who went from Obama voters who made way worse rape jokes than us to Biden voters who want to shoot you in the head for saying men and women are different.
Finally a recap that makes sense. I've seen this show held up as an example of a good dub and an excuse for arrogant localisers to ride roughshod over the source material they work on. I've never understood why a subjective assertion that 'the original is boring and this makes it much funnier' would suddenly justify a complete rewrite in this one case.
Makes much more sense that it was proto-SJWS using it as an opportunity to disrespect the source material and play the dubbing game from Whose Line Is It Anyway. This is the kind of humour that nobody under 30 considered risky in the 2000s, so the people praising the dub are either too young to remember that or simply politically aligned with the clique these dubbers went on to become.
Yeah I wouldn't mind a joke dub if there was an actual version of it played straight as well. It's the same plague as modern localizers who think they know better than the original writers and just remake everything to be how they want. Some people just don't care because it was a funny oddity, but I would never want something like that happening to a story I created.
Samurai Pizza Cats?
"Italy, Japan, and Greece get together to make a TV show. Greece said it had to have cats, and Italy insisted on pizza. So they made a show, but when they sent it to America, Japan forgot to include the script. So America just put in whatever he thought was funny." - nods to Hetalia
I think this can also be true with "literally no one would even know it exists outside Japan if not for this dub." Because history is filled with anime that were passable and fine, but went nowhere outside Japan because the hurdle is that much higher.
Because having seen a few episodes of the actual, non-gag version (entirely to test this myself a long time ago) I can tell you with certainty that it is a bland, inoffensive show that does little to make it worth watching outside background noise. Its not bad but its almost sadder if someone does care about it because of how meh it is.
Could've left it at they are voice actors. From my understanding and the main reason why I don't like English dubs(+is weird as English is my second language) is because they're all insufferable people. I try to not acknowledge them when they are just people who dub over the original which is a lot better anyway. Exception is ghost stories and I am 99% sure translators and the studio that bought the rights are to thank for this, not the voice actors.
The ones that aren't pieces of shit get blackballed out of the industry, even if it takes fabrication of rape.
Look at Vic Mignogna.
I just in general prefer to have the original voices in anime. Same with movies(mind you, older ones) where I much rather watch the original and get weird looks my family and friends who only watch stuff in my native language.
Monica Rial, the woman how voiced Momoko, the Christian. She was involved in falsely accusing Vic Mignogna.
It was before anime was "mainstream" so it never caught on to be offended about. Especially as most of the cast* were never that big of names to draw attention to people trying to trawl their past to cancel them. Double especially as a fucking English Dub in the 00s, where they were at their lowest value and popularity to a point where most of the time they existed as copyright schemes instead of products to be released.
*Monica Rial is the only exception, and as shown by being the primary reason why KickVic got off the ground she is 100% the type who would have crucified someone else for this. But since its her, she is likely keeping it protected and quiet from the mob by being a "face of survivors."
That dub is part of the reason modern localizers feel they can play fast and loose with their work. "This one was turned into a big joke and was quite popular so I am going to do the same and get the same popularity."
(A bigger part is just straight subversion.)
There was another one similar with Urusei Yatsura (not the one that came out in 2022) in that it was dubbed by the BBC so you have British accents swearing in a old school Japanese anime, really funny if you watch clips of it.
I don't think Japan would care as much if it was a situation like this where a poor viewership series let the dub guys go crazy with gags, they are MORE concerned with the injection of politics as they see what's happened to western entertainment and they want NONE of that coming over there.
There's been a few attempts here and there but thankfully that's why dub VAs are looked down on generally unless they can prove themselves (like Vic) whereas a Japanese VA, even if a percentage of the audience can't understand Japanese, can get people in to watch by their presence alone.
I saw a few clips of that version online, it's an excellent dub. Acted well and the jokes hit the spirit of the jokes, at least as translated by Viz and AnimEigo.
When I was younger I liked the Ghost Stories style dub of Crayon Shin-Chan but as I got older, I kind of resent it. When they go full throttle on fake translations, copyright law means there's no legitimate way to enjoy the true source material in my language as the original artists intended.
Luckily for you, the DVD version of Ghost Stories has both the true text, and the "true" text, both options.
Oh God, this shit again. No, it didn't bomb. It was a filler show made to take up air time. I swear to God, I'm going to fucking toaster bath myself if I hear people mention this topic again.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wVkYediuSuw
One of my hobbies is rewriting subtitle files with offensive humour - I'll have to check this show out
It's a mess in the best ways. Just ignore that the voice actors of some of the characters are... actual bad people. The work lives on its own, they've disowned it anyways.
Considering that it already got 10 upvotes, I think the community would rather have it up.